--SOMETIMES A PEP TALK, SOMETIMES A KICK IN THE ASS

…I wrote this a long time ago:

Little Boy Lost

I was not supposed to

write this,
not today of all days,
sun shining through sideways fingers of rain
that dimple my window
with incriminations and reminders
of another time
when you waited for me on a pale blue beach chair,
the one with the purposely chipped paint
and for some reason when I arrived
you said, “We are kind of like this chair, don’t you think?”
That night I combed the beach as it started spitting, drizzling, hissing on the sand and sea,
freckled starshine glittering on the black glass
as it roved like a panther into itself and out,
in and out this indiscriminate judge.
And I thought about how I loved you
and how that had eaten us alive,
such gory gluttony,
my need like a current sucking you into its vortex,
strangling you,
smothering you.

And I did not cry
nor did I return.
I let you go,
in my immature misery
that has now
all these years later
found itself a place to rest
here on my death bed,
weathered
wrinkled
and poorly worn.

…Here are some things I like and hope you do as well:

"Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame." Erica Jong

"The poet doesn't invent.  He listens." Jean Cocteau

"Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.” Jeffrey Eugenides

"Great things are not achieved by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion." Kerouac

"The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart." Mencius

"A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him." Benjamin Black

"It is with bad sentiments that one makes good novels." Aldous Huxley

"I still each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, books I want to read, friends I want to talk to." John Burroughs